Three Russian cosmonauts sent social media over the moon when they boarded the International Space Station on Friday dressed in yellow suits with blue accents, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
The cosmonauts, whose uniforms were emblazoned with Russian flags, have not said the space fashion choice was meant as a nod to Ukraine, and several sources, including the press service of Russia’s space agency, suggested the colors were intended to send a different signal.
“Sometimes yellow is just yellow,” Roscosmos’s press service said on its Telegram channel, per Reuters. “The flight suits of the new crew are made in the colors of the emblem of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, which all three cosmonauts graduated from … to see the Ukrainian flag everywhere and in everything is crazy.”
ZELENSKY ANSWERS PUTIN’S RALLY WITH WARNING, PLEA FOR PEACE
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, supported the theory that the suits could have been inspired by the three cosmonauts’ alma mater, which has similar colors on its logo.
It is actually plausible that the ‘Ukrainian’ color flight suits are in fact “Bauman University” color suits. They made a big deal of this being the first all-Bauman crew. (BMGTU is sort of Moscow’s MIT AeroAstro and many Russian astronauts are graduates) https://t.co/9yPLgwtYHv
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) March 18, 2022
But Eric Berger, a senior space editor at Ars Technica, pointed out that the yellow tone on the Bauman logo was not a close match with the yellow on their flight suits. Berger tweeted that he has not seen a definitive explanation for the suit choice.
Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev offered a different explanation, saying the team had an excess of yellow material.
“It became our turn to pick a color. But in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material, so we needed to use it,” Artemyev told his family when asked, according to the Associated Press. “So that’s why we had to wear yellow.”
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield noted that his team chose its colors months in advance of takeoff but expressed support for the unintentional messaging of the color scheme.
“We personally choose our flight suit colors months in advance, so they can be made and packed in time for launch. Thus I suspect the blue and yellow wasn’t intended as a political statement, but I like that it is,” he said.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Cosmonauts Artemyev, Denis Matveyev, and Sergey Korsakov blasted off from a launch center in Kazakhstan on Friday evening and successfully docked at the space station about three hours later. They are the first new Russians to arrive on the space station since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, joining four U.S. astronauts, two Russians, and one German on the floating space platform.
The ISS is a joint venture between the United States, Russia, and a slew of other countries, but the conflict in Ukraine has put a strain on the prospects of continued cooperation with Russia. On Thursday, the European Space Agency announced it was suspending its ExoMars joint initiative with Russia in response to the invasion. Last month, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin mused about sending the ISS crashing down to Earth as retribution for the West’s sanctions against Russia, but NASA Administrator Bill Nelson brushed off Rogozin’s comments at the time, saying, “That’s just Dmitry Rogozin.“
